plans within plans, and things to work out

If it's true that the Dems themselves orchestrated Biden's debate failure (see here for an elaboration of that theory), then the Dems have finally understood the need to play 3D chess against Donald Trump. It also means that not all Dems are on the same page: with so many on the left expressing shock and confusion about Biden's now painfully obvious mental state, it's apparent that the Dems aren't all on the same conspiratorial page. The deeper-thinking Dems are looking a few moves ahead to the person who will replace Biden while others see only what's in front of them: a doddering, faltering, incapable old man. So at this point, the question of whether Biden will be replaced remains open. I fall on the side of the naysayers: I think Biden will, by the force of his own fraying will, stay in the race, which will be a plus for Trump. That said, I don't think it's irrational to assume the Dems might try to replace him: ultimately, what they care about is power, not who is in power. Just get "our guy" in there, whoever "our guy" might end up being. Remember the shenanigans when Hillary and the DNC fucked over Bernie Sanders in a most undemocratic way? There are a thousand ways not to give the people what they want.

The conservatives, meanwhile, have some issues of their own to work out. Chief among them is the fact that many on the right have been strongly questioning the legitimacy of 2020, and the debate keeps ping-ponging back and forth. Absolutely no evidence of shenanigans! Cowardly courts won't allow evidence to be viewed! Back and forth it goes. This leaves the right in an awkward position if Trump should win come November: admit the election was legitimate this time (and maybe credit some of the feeble local actions currently in the works to monitor polls), or continue to question electoral legitimacy, which could risk the invalidation of a Trump victory? Dilemmas, dilemmas. I suppose it's possible to claim that a steal was attempted but defeated (the groundwork for this was laid long ago with the rhetoric of "beating the margin of fraud"). If this argument gets trotted out, though, there really needs to be hard, clear evidence of a second attempted steal.

Another story that conservatives need to get straight is their take on Joe Biden's overall vigor and mental status. I've been pretty clear on this blog that I blame Joe Biden personally for the shit-show that has been his term in office. A lot of other people (including one of my favorites, Vivek Ramaswamy) want to make Biden out to be a puppet, a manipulated rag doll controlled by a mysterious cabal, and while I don't find this view irrational given the constant stream of video evidence we have that Biden is not mentally all there, I don't subscribe to claims of "elder abuse," etc., that make Biden out to be a sympathetic senior citizen at the end of his years. No: he still retains at least some of his marbles, which means he's still morally responsible for fouling the living-room carpet.

I wrote this comment at Instapundit in response to a claim of elder abuse:

Please stop. Claiming elder abuse merely (1) generates unnecessary sympathy for Biden and (2) absolves the man of responsibility. Is he going senile? Yes. But does he still retain the power of choice, and does he still have an ego? Also yes. You can't blame Biden if you're always calling him well-meaning but incompetent. Until he actually is a corpse, I blame him.

And I got this response:

Biden isn't responsible because Biden isn't in charge. Biden did exactly what the democrats needed him to do, he remained conscious for the entire debate. That's all the democrats and their media needed. All the rest will be handled later with the proper and lengthy repetition of "Trump was mean and Trump lied".

People don't understand that this isn't a political debate with a fair and rational opponent. This is a debate with a wife who wants to divorce you and take everything you own.

There is no rhetorical win possible. It doesn't matter what strategy people use. Claiming elder abuse (and I do) isn't going to change anything so people should feel free to do it if they want because it's clear that soon it won't be allowed.

As you can imagine, I vehemently disagree, but I don't think the respondent is irrational for thinking this way. A lot of smart people also see Biden merely as a meat puppet. But to the extent that Biden at least survived the debate with Trump by stringing together semi-rational sentences, I'm not willing to declare him brain-dead. There's certainly evidence for both sides of this issue: evidence of incompetence and manipulation by others, and evidence of rationality and ego. For now, I'm tilting toward rationality and ego still playing a role. There may very well be a cabal, but if so, Biden is a willing part of the operation.

In an earlier post, I quoted a bit from a Washington Post article. Later in the day, I scrolled down to the bottom of the article to look at comments. Because this is the Post, I expected most of those comments to come from Democrats, and this turned out to be the case. What I saw was revealing: most of the comments showed an electorate that doesn't see 3D chess happening, but does nevertheless think Biden needs to go, not for strategic reasons but simply because he appeared too old, frail, and confused. And that's my summation of many of the sympathetic commenters. Most of them, I suspect, fall in line with the elder-abuse claim, which means I think they're wrong.

And that's a core sample of some of the issues and opinions arising from this debate. Did the debate move the needle? Well, if that one graph I cited is to be believed, it did, at least for Vegas bettors. But overall, I think the country has divided or coalesced into camps, and not much that happens between now and November is going to matter. Keep watching the black demographic, though. Something seismic may be happening there. There were signs of this back in 2016, too, when Trump clinched a larger portion of the black vote than is usually garnered by Republicans. I think that's partly because, when the black community sniffed Trump, they smelled a Democrat, and I've been saying that for a long time, too: Trump is basically a 90s-era, pro-worker, anti-free-trade, antiwar Democrat who Trojan Horsed his values into the Republican party, producing an immense immune reaction from neocons like Mitt Romney and John McCain and all the rest of the Never Trumpers who saw clearly that Trump was toxic to what was then the Republican brand. But to be MAGA these days is to espouse 90s-era Democrat values—to be, to some extent, a Clintonian. (There's more to being MAGA than just that, of course, and I don't mean to imply there's nothing recognizably conservative about this current incarnation of Trump and MAGA-ness, but you'd have to be blind to deny that old-school Dem values aren't at work, right now, within the GOP.)

My boss is hoping that Trump picks Ron DeSantis to be his VP. If I can't have Vivek, I'm hoping it's either Tulsi (despite how some GOPers are circumspect about her, and despite her non-GOP status) or Byron Donalds, who is a fucking pit bull in the spirit of Mark Robinson. A few years back, I'd have said that having a black man on the ticket as your VP would quell all the rumblings that you're a racist, but since the left no longer has any problem calling black people and people of Indian heritage (Candace Owens, Larry Elder, Vivek Ramaswamy) "white supremacists," I guess anything goes. There are no guarantees.